In certain circles it has become almost conventional wisdom that there are remarkable resemblances between the life and mission of Jesus Christ and of the Hindu avatar/deity Krishna. This phenomenon was brought to my attention again recently by hearing of the conversion of Dr. Michael Sudduth of San Francisco State University to a version of Gaudya Vaishnavism (broadly speaking, a Bengali Hindu school of devotion to Vishnu in which Krishna is considered to be the supreme personal Godhead, though not the well-known ISKCON "Hare Krishna" movement). Still, since his strain is also derived from the Vaishnavism initiated in the early sixteenth century, who emphasized that devotees of Krishna ought to dance and repeat the Mahamantra, I'm surmising that it is not entirely different from the aforementioned form. Here are some pictures of evening aarti ("celebration of lights") and puja ("worship, offering") at the Hare Krishna temple in Chicago. 

 I don't know Prof. Sudduth personally, though he was kind enough to send me an e-mail correcting some errors on my part in a letter that was posted (with my permission) on the Triablogue.  In his own statement, circulated around the web, he declared that

... the basic principles of Gaudiya Vaishnavism are logically compatible with a number of fundamental Christian beliefs: the deity of Christ, virgin birth, his resurrection, and the soteriological importance (even necessity of) his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. In converting to Vaishnavism I do not relinquish these beliefs but simply situate them in a different philosophical and theological context. That being said, I intend in the future to write on the subject of the relationship between the above aspects of GV and Christian theism.

I'm not going to do anything as silly as to respond to something that Dr. Sudduth has not yet written. For all that I know, none of what I'm about to write may have anything to do with his views. His statement simply reminded me of the many bizarre assertions that people have made on the subject. So, for example, I just entered "Christ and Krishna" (nothing else) into the Google search box, and the first site I hit made the following declaration:

Let me immediately tell you, with regard to #10, that I have no clue what anyone would mean by "the color of Christ Consciousness." Krishna is, indeed, usually pictured as dark, often as dark blue. In fact, that's actually the literal meaning of his name k&Z[, "the dark one," or "the dark blue one."

And that observation, of course, takes us to the first (unnumbered) assertion on the site, the apparent resemblance in names. As I just said, Krishna's name is derived from the color of his complexion in traditional iconography (or vice versa). The word "Christ" is derived from the Greek word that translates the Hebrew "Messiah," the "Anointed One." It's not even a name, but a title. His name was "Jesus" (or its Hebrew equivalent, Yashua). Regardless, it's a long road from "the dark blue one" to "the anointed one," and the only way one can get there is by "synonymbolism." This term is a neologism that occurred to me in the context of my previous discussion of deciphering the supposed inner meanings of Chinese characters. It describes a technique: If you can't get some symbol to say what you want it to, keep trying until you find the right synonym for it, and you have your "surprising" result. The same website quotes A. C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada, the founder of ISKCON as saying:

"When an Indian person calls on Krishna, he often says, Krsta. Krsta is a Sanskrit word meaning attraction. So when we address God as Christ, Krsta, or Krishna we indicate the same all-attractive Supreme Personality of Godhead. When Jesus said, 'Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be Thy name', the name of God was Krsta or Krishna."

So, an occasional synonym for Krishna can be Krsta, which means attraction. Since Krishna is the Supreme God he is attractive. Jesus was referring to the same God, who was, therefore, also attractive. Consequently, Jesus must have used the word Krsta. And since Krsta is an occasional synonym for Krishna, Jesus was directing our attention to Krishna. You've got to give Prabhupada points for creativity, but, I'm afraid he loses them all for lack of soundness in his argument.

Strictly speaking, the name of God in the Bible is "Yahweh." He is also frequently referred to as "El" and "Elohim." In Aramaic, the language that Jesus used, the word for God is "Elah." But, of course, what Jesus was saying there was not specifically that the phoneme referring to God should be hallowed, but the reality represented by the phoneme. Regardless, I'm quite sure Jesus was not using a Sanskrit word.  But even if he had been, how would that lead to "Christ" as "Krishna" being synonymous?

I believe I can address the rest of the points basically by telling you the story of Krishna. I'm assuming that my readers are familiar with the life of Jesus from the gospels. I will make reference to Christ by way of contrast from time to time anyway. The characterizations above are basically generalities, and the best way to see if they hold up is by examining the details. However, before doing so, let us draw our camera back as far as we can so that we can get the "cosmic" view of Christ and Krishna, viz. their basic role inside of the respective religions that worship them. What we see is that the religions stipulate different issues as the main problem besetting humankind, that they offer solutions to their own stipulated problems, which are consequently also different, and that, as a result, the two persons involved will have two completely different missions.

In Christianity, the basic problem besetting humanity is that, due to our sin and our fallen state, we are alienated from God, our Creator. The solution is that we can be reconciled to God on the basis of faith in the person and work of Christ in his life, atoning death, and resurrection. For Hinduism, humanity's central problem is that of existing in the seemingly never-ending cycle of reincarnations (samsara), which carries with it constant suffering. The solution is to find release (moksha) from that cycle. In the case of Krishna's teachings in the Bhagavad Gita moksha entailed 1) performing one's caste duty without attachment to its results, and 2) clinging to Krishna alone so the he can release a person from the vicious cycle. Clinging to him involves practicing the yoga that he delineates. So, we have, on the one hand, an Atoner and Reconciler to God, and on the other hand a Releaser from samsara. The cosmic view seems to indicate a rather clear dissimilarity between the two figures. Obviously, both summaries are very rough, but that's the intent. Nothing will change the disparity in basic purposes by more refined theological nuancing.

Now, let's start the story of Krishna. My basic secondary sources are: Alain Daniélou,The Myths and Gods of India (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1991, orig. 1964); P. Thomas, Epics, Myths and Legends of India (Bombay: Taraporevala, 1961); Edward Moor, The Hindu Pantheon (Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, 1976, orig. 1810).

A long, long time ago--I confess that I'm always amused when some Hindus specify a definite time, e.g., 10,000 years ago. We have no records whatsoever connecting this story to any historical events, except to say that, if these things happened, then they might have occurred around, say the time of the Aryan immigration, but that's just speculation. Anyway, I think I better start over.

A long, long time ago, there was a king named Ugrasena, who, together with his incredibly beautiful wife, Padmavati, ruled over the land of Mathura. In fact, when I say that she was beautiful, I mean that she was just plain irresistible. If beauty can be a curse, then this queen would be a case in point because one night an asura (demon) disguised himself as Ugrasena and inflicted himself on her. And wouldn't you know it? She became pregnant and gave birth to a really obnoxious child, who, as is usually the case with obnoxious children, turned into an obnoxious adult. His name was Kamsa.

Kamsa was mean, cruel, heartless, and selfish. According to some versions, he killed his father so that he could become king, according to others he imprisoned him in the deepest dungeon. Then he extended all of his evil attributes to all the subjects of the kingdom, and everyone was suffering. In short, things were bad.

Now whenever, the universe gets really off-track, Vishnu takes on the form of an animal or person and descends to earth to remedy the matter. The fact that he "descends" has given rise to the term avatar, where ava means "down," and so he is "the one who comes down." (The idea of an "avatar" being a cartoonish representation of a person on the web is one of those annoying, but perhaps unavoidable, twists in the development of a language.)

In the Ramayana we read: “Whenever there is loss of dharma on earth, the Lord incarnates himself in order to destroy the demons and to restore dharma.” [Swami Venkatesananda, tr.,The Concise Ramayana of Valmiki, Uttara 8i (New York: SUNY, 1988), p. 356],

Finally a blog post again, but this is still going to be a short one.  What I've been doing with my "discretionary" key board time is to take all the entries on the trip of last October (Indiana -> Cherokee, NC -> Boston -> Bangkok, Thailand -> Singapore -> Boston  -> Indiana)  and weave them together into a hopefully meaningful sequence. Let the dancers below take you there.

June and I got to be out in it in the dark tonight (Thursday). Our old range-riding compadre, Jim K., had invited us over to his house. It was a rural address that I wrote down very carefully and then--needless to say--left at home. So, I did my normal job of improvisation, which produced the usual ineffective results, and, given the swirling snow and the darkness, I actually wound up getting us lost in Grant County. We finally found ourselves in some small town, which we didn't recognize for a while. It turned out to be good old Upland, just a side of the town we don't usually see. So, we stopped by Nick and Meghan's, who had just gotten home, and used their phone to get the directions repeated. Then we had a great time with our friend, catching up on things that have transpired over the last few years.

It occurs to me that I never told you about Poly's Christmas present. In case you're a relatively new reader, "Poly" comes from "roly-poly," based on the fact that he appeared as though he was just a little ball of fur when he showed up on our front porch mewing, while the temperature outside was far below zero. (So, his name rhymes with "goalie"; it is not the same as the name of that parrot that wants a cracker.) Apparently someone was ridding themselves of unwanted kittens by putting them outside in those sub-arctic temperatures. (Actually, at the time I was in Singapore, suffering for the Lord where the temperatures were in the low 80's or so.) June took him in, and he's been gracing us with his presence for 18 years now.

He still is in great shape and good health, but 18 years gets pretty advanced for a cat, and it shows. The days are over that I can wave around a toy on a string and get him to jump up and do summersaults. He climbs up and down the stairs as slowly as I do these days--no more "I'm gonna get you!" while he rockets past me on the steps. But he still loves to stalk and pounce on toys occasionally. However, for the human, holding the to-be-pounced-upon object and waving it around for ten minutes or so, while he stalks around it until he finally decides to make a move, can get pretty tedious. That's where "Undercover Mouse" comes in to help.

As you can see in the top right picture, the device consists of a yellow canopy with a battery-powered motor at the center, and, barely visible in the picture, there is a little red plastic string protruding a couple of inches outward. The motor makes the string move around the perimeter, back and forth, at random intervals and distances, simulating the activity of a busy mouse. It may stop for a moment, then go half way around the circle, immediately move back an eighth, with very little pause continue on another third of the circle, then back up again, etc. As you can see, Poly really likes this toy. Sometimes he sits for a long time, just keeping track of the movements. At other times, he decides to hunt whatever that pseudo-mouse tail may be attached to under the cover. As you can see, he's had some success.

Happy Hunting!

		Bible Reading: Jeremiah 36
Vv. 22-23: Since it was the ninth month, the king was sitting in his winter quarters with a fire burning in front of him. As soon as Jehudi would read three or four columns, Jehoiakim would cut the scroll with a scribe’s knife and throw the columns into the blazing fire until the entire scroll was consumed by the fire in the brazier. (HCSB)

 I had promised that I would give you a little more of a picture of Jehoiakim's depravity. His most outstanding episode in my estimation was the time that he burned Jeremiah's book. This chapter is filled with lots of persons and names. We'll meet the important characters as the story proceeds.

First, there's Yahweh, the LORD God, whose patience with Judah is just about run out. And yet, remarkably he gives Josiah, his officials, and all those who were violating God's law yet another chance. He told Jeremiah, his prophet, to write down all of his prophecies and warnings up to that time, going back to the thirteenth year (Jeremiah 1:2) of Josiah's reign (out of a total of 31) into the fourth year of Jehoiakim, so we're looking at a summary of his messages given over 22 years or so. God said to Jeremiah,

Perhaps when the house of Judah hears about all the disaster I am planning to bring on them, each one of them will turn from his evil way. Then I will forgive their wrongdoing and their sin.

So, Jeremiah called on Baruch, a scribe, to write down everything that Jeremiah was dictating to him, and it turned into a pretty lengthy scroll. Please be aware that our present book of Jeremiah is not compiled in chronological order, so we can't just say that Baruch wrote down everything contained from Jeremiah 1 through 35, but a great part of that material may have been on Baruch's scroll.

Even though God didn't specify it, since the scroll wouldn't necessarily be very effective if no one knew what was in it, it needed to be read to the people. Jeremiah was barred from the temple premises, so Baruch, who must have been a believer in Yahweh as well as an assistant to Jeremiah, took on the job to go up to the temple and read the scroll there out loud on a day of fasting, when a large number of residents of Jerusalem as well as pilgrims from surrounding Judah would be present. Jeremiah himself was persona non gratis in the temple precinct. If you go back to Jeremiah 26, you'll see that it begins almost the same way as chapter 36, except that in the earlier case it was Jeremiah himself who stood there publicly and proclaimed all of God's warnings and exhortations. He was taken prisoner and barely avoided execution. Now Baruch took his place, preaching the same messages that Jeremiah had delivered earlier, except reading from the scroll that the prophet had dictated.

A question occurs to me. Why read the scroll in the temple? Aren't all the people in the temple precisely those who are worshiping Yahweh and don't need to hear Jeremiah's message? Isn't this a case of "preaching to the choir"? Actually (and sadly) not at all. Once again there were idols in the temple, the priesthood was corrupt, and already when Jeremiah had spoken in the temple (chapter 26 again), some people had pointed out to him what a faux pas it was for him to prophesy in the name of Yahweh in the temple. Hard to believe, but true.

The court secretary for King Josiah, at the time when the Book of the Law was discovered, was a man named Shaphan. He had two sons, Ahikam and Gemariah, both of whom were favorably disposed toward Jeremiah. Ahikam had averted Jeremiah's execution (26:24), and Gemariah made his chamber in the complex available to Baruch, so that Baruch would have a good position (presumably from its window) from which he could be heard by the crowd. Gemariah did not stay there himself. We will find him next together with all of the other main officials of the court in the scribe's chambers. I am speculating here that either Gemariah did not want to be associated directly with Jeremiah's words, or that he deliberately joined the other officials to keep them away from the temple, so that Baruch could read the scroll without interruption.

However, Gemariah had a son named Micaiah, who apparently felt the need to be seen as important. As soon as Baruch had finished his recitation, he rushed to the assembled officials and reported to them the outrageous things that Baruch had read in the name of the prophet. So, they sent a man named Jehudi to find Baruch and invite him to repeat his performance in their presence. Jehudi, whose name is actually merely the generic designation "a Jew," carried out this assignment and brought Baruch before the officials. They listened to him read it, and, needless to say, they hated it. They didn't like the content, and they did not want to bring it before the king, but they had no choice. His majesty must be informed of what was being prophesied, even if he got angry. The officials quizzed Baruch, just to make sure they understood exactly how that scroll had come to exist. Then they counseled him to go into hiding somewhere together with Jeremiah. They deposited the scroll officially in the scribe's chamber, and took the long walk across the court yard to the king's winter apartment to inform him of this incident. I think it speaks to their insecurity that they did not just take the scroll with them. 

They found King Jehoiakim sitting in front of an open fire pot, trying to keep warm.  They reported to him about Baruch reading the scroll, perhaps hoping that the king would leave matters be. If so, their hopes went unfulfilled. Jehoiakim wanted to hear all of the "treasonous" words. He sent Jehudi back to the scribe's chamber to retrieve the scroll, and Jehoiakim had Jehudi read it to him. The officials for the most part stayed, and apparently a sizeable number of various other people associated with the court joined them.  Jehudi started reading, unrolling the scroll column by column. Jehoiada paid attention, but apparently thought it was all very funny. Every three or four columns, he had Jehudi stop, and--over the protests of Elnathan, Delaiah, and Gemariah--cut off what had just been read and deposited it in the fire.

There was no sign of repentance anywhere by anyone. The despicable message had been eliminated. God was out of the picture once again. There was only one thing left to do: Jehoiakim ordered three young men, including one of his sons, to find the disruptive prophet and his scribe so that they could be eliminated once and for all. The three prophet-hunters, however, had no luck finding their game. Not only had the two followed the officials'  advice, our text actually tells us that the Lord himself had hidden them.

Not too long thereafter, Jeremiah bought another empty scroll, and he and Baruch got together again to write it all down once more as well as to add some material from time to time. But this time, God did not tell Jeremiah to use the scroll as an enticement to bring the king to repentance. Instead, it was a confirmation of the sentence God had passed on Jehoiada, Jerusalem, and Judah for their disobedience.

Of all the reactions that Jehoiakim could have had to the scroll, making a game out of burning its sections as Jehudi was reading it, surely was the most irrational possible. Where was Jehoiakim getting the security that let him feel free to treat the message from the prophet of Yahweh in this way? What did he think he knew that made it possible for him not just to ignore, but to burn it like last week's newspapers? What knowledge did he have that others did not?

The answer is, of course, nowhere and nothing. This is a point that continually astounds me about the Jehoiakims of the world, such as the so-called new atheists and their imitators who make a veritable Vaudeville act out of their unbelief. What do they know, what have they experienced, that is so categorically different that they not only reject belief in God, but feel the need to do so with as much self-congratulatory ceremony as they can muster? Nothing. They're not people like Eli Wiesel, who went through Auschwitz and had his faith pushed against the wall--and did not give up belief altogether. They're people who worship themselves to such an extent that they must make a public show of their contempt of God. Their lives are no better or worse than those of others; we all have our share of suffering. They're not smarter than others, nor are they better educated than others. Like Jehoiakim, they're simply so self-absorbed that they cannot even bring themselves to engage with the message of God rationally, but (figuratively now) burn it to get it out of their lives.

Still, I must add that, as sad and absurd their reaction may be, ultimately it's still between them and the Lord. For us, it does not change whatever part God has called us to play in the continuing presentation of his grace to the world. Our job is not to change the attitudes of unbelievers, but to show them the gospel of Christ so that they can accept his offer of salvation. Nobody said that it would be easy . . .

Well, there's no way of getting around it: Tuesday evenings are a bad time to try to write a blog entry when all of the good TV series are running: NCIS, followed by NCIS-LA, concluding with Unforgettable. And I do not even come close to having the capacity for multitasking that I used to a few years ago. To which does one give priority: life or posting something on the web?----What do you mean "the TV shows aren't real life?" They seem more real to me than what frequently follows on the 11 o'clock news.

Lots of little activities are filling in between scholarly pursuits.  June and I took our second trip to the Recycling Center in Muncie over the last six days. Last week we liberated ourselves of a large amount of stuff that's accumulated in the garage, though there's still a lot to go. Today it was an entire truck load of computer equipment that someone close to June and me, though not identical with either, had accumulated. He's possibly been even more of an electronics hoarder than your cord-entangled bloggist, which is saying something. I guess you never know when a piece of a ten-year-old motherboard will come in handy. Really. But one runs out of space after a while.  

A few days ago, I asked for prayer for my dad's upcoming back surgery. It's still upcoming, now slated for Thursday. I won't go into details, but (and because) it's complicated, but, if you read this, send one up on his behalf, please!

A quick, unrelated observation: I can't think of anyone more "bush" than those Democrats who were not present in the Indiana House Chamber for the governor's "state of the state" address, regardless of their stance on the "Right to Work" bill. (Okay, I probably can, but not at the moment.) There should be a dignity attached to holding a political office that overshadows political divisions at ceremonial moments.

		Bible Reading: 2 Kings 23:34-24:7
24:7: Now the king of Egypt did not march out of his land again, for the king of Babylon took everything that belonged to the king of Egypt, from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates River. (HCSB)

 Also see Jeremiah 36 and my entry of September 1, 2011.

A correction is in order: The Pharaoh Neco (also spelled Necho) who comes up here is not the same as the one who was installed by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. This one is Neco II, his grandson, I believe.

A matter of terminology: We are calling the empire "Babylonia" and the city "Babylon."

At the command of Pharaoh Neco II, Jehoiakim became king of Judah. 2 Kings does not have a whole of good to say concerning him, and the further details in Jeremiah 36 don't make him look any better. As mentioned, at the battle of Carchemish, Nebuchadnezzar, chief general and heir-apparent of Babylonia, defeated the combined forces of Assyria and Egypt. By defeating Egypt, he took all of the former territorial possessions of Egypt. Neco and his father Psamtik I had managed to re-establish Egypt as a power in the Levant (Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria), but it was a short-term occupation. Look at the geographic extension mentioned in our featured verse: "from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates." Does that sound familiar? It should, because it is exactly the description of the "Promised Land," as given to Abraham (Genesis 15:18) and finally achieved under David and Solomon (2 Kings 7:8). Now the same phrase is used to refer to the land that had momentarily belonged to Egypt, but had fallen under Nebuchadnezzar's proprietorship. How sad!  Due to this switch in political power, Jehoiakim, having barely been installed as a vassal king to Egypt, now owed allegiance and tribute to Babylonia. Nebuchanezzar's first visit to Jerusalem was short and to the point, but he was under a tight schedule because he had to return to Babylon. Like General MacArthur, he would be back.

Shortly after Carchemish, Nabopolassar, the founder of the neo-Babylonian state, had passed away. So, as intimated, Nebuchadnezzar went back to Babylon, accepted the crown, and began overseeing massive building projects. Then he reassembled his army and marched back to the land of Hatti (the Levant) to make sure that Neco and his Egyptian military would not cause any further problems. (Does this sound similar to Ashurbanipal and Esarhaddon or what? It's uncanny, but, then again, look at how much the beginning of WW II resembled the beginning of WWI.)  Neco came up to confront him, and the two armies fought a ferocious battle, with too many losses on both sides to call either one a victor. However, politically, that apparent stand-off sealed Nebuchadnezzar's domination of this area. Neco returned home with however many of his soldiers had survived and remained there the rest of his life. Perhaps he spent his leisure hours sipping lemonade in the shade of the pyramids or angling for catfish in the Nile, but one thing was clear: He refused to come out again for any kind of military confrontation. This resolution of his to stay out of trouble caused immense problems for anyone who wanted to rebel against Babylonia and just assumed that he would receive Neco's active support.

Nebuchadnezzar had to return to Babylon with a decimated army as well. The New Bible Dictionary (article "Neco") speculates that this apparent defeat may have been the catalyst for Jehoiakim to cease his role as Nebuchadnezzar's vassal. That, of course, was not good judgment. For one thing, if Jehoiakim had been among those who were counting on Neco's support, he was also one of those who had made a fatal error in that respect. Apparently Nebuchadnezzar was not yet ready to go campaigning himself, so he delegated various ethnic subdivisions of his army to harass Jerusalem. Then, when he had matters sufficiently under control again, he headed up his army once more as he went back to chat with Jehoiakim in person. He caused some damage, reasserted his authority, reimbursed himself from Jehoiakim's treasury, and went home taking along some of the finest youths of Judah, including Daniel and his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed Nego.  Obviously, he could have had no idea how important those teenagers would become in his life.

This was the first of three times that he deported people from Jerusalem to Babylon, as laid out in the table below.

 I had intended to fill you in on the person of Jehoiakim a little more, but it is getting too late now, so you'll have to wait for the next Bible entry. In the meantime, if you'll look up that link to Jeremiah 36, you'll be well-prepared for my commentary.

One of the biggest obstacles that my ministry partners (D.M. and Wyatt) and I seem to be facing almost every day is, what Wyatt calls the "colonizing" of religious beliefs. This tactic occurs whenever a religion , call it “A,” reinterprets the beliefs of religion B, so that it can say that actually the beliefs of religion B are just another way of stating what religion A holds, and thus, religion B has always only been a subset of religion A. This is a somewhat aggressive form of an inclusivist view of all religions. It is not really a form of relativism because in so far as it may say that all religions are equally true, the truth of those religions becomes the truth of the colonizing religion. Thus, for example, when certain Buddhists or Hindus claim that ultimately Christianity is just as true as their religions, what they mean is that, at heart, Christianity ultimately reduces to Buddhism or Hinduism, as the case may be.

Needless to say, and this is why I'm calling it "aggressive," such an attempt at colonization is always a tour-de-force. The religion being colonized has to be changed in order to adapt it to the colonizing religion. This is not a hard thing to do if you make use of the principle that all things are the same so long as you ignore the differences, a rather slanted use of Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, known to my students for many years as the "Cookie Monster principle" ("If you do not differ from cookie monster, then you are cookie monster"). Furthermore, even if this is done under the guise of religious ecumenism or tolerance of all religions, which sounds positive on the surface, from the point of view of the true believer in religion B, it co-opts the integrity of his religion. Insofar as someone may hold core beliefs that do not fit into the system of the colonizing religion, in order to go along with this procedure she would have to abdicate her own religion for all practical purposes. Colonizing is not the same thing as proselytizing, but it has the same effect.

Thus, I react negatively to the attempts at colonization by various people, whether they be adherents of Buddhism, Hinduism, Baha'i, or the nihilism of John Hick, because I am not willing to give up my beliefs for the sake of anyone's triumphalist religious hash. Let Hinduism be Hinduism, Buddhism be Buddhism, Baha'i be Baha'i, Christianity be Christianity, and let John Hick be irrelevant, and let us test the truth of religions without transmorphing one into another. And, oh yeah, let traditional Chinese religion be traditional Chinese religion without forcing a biblical pattern on it.

And thus we come to last night's topic of finding implicit references to the narratives of the early books of Genesis embedded in the ancient Chinese characters for such words as "creation" and "flood." My conclusion as of last night was that, as far as I can tell, given what I know about patterns in linguistics, and what I read from  some experts on the etymology of Chinese characters, this is at best a weak, unverifiable, strategy that seems to raise more questions than it answers, and thus, even if it turned out that it was true, would probably not be a good tool for Christian apologetics.

But, as far as I'm concerned, this is only the beginning of the story. One should think that, if these characters are a part of the heritage of Chinese beliefs, a story roughly similar to the biblical one would have been maintained in Chinese mythology. Well, to some extent it has, namely inasmuch as Chinese culture, similar to most cultures all over the world, has a story of a huge flood. However, since a flood narrative seems to be found in almost all cultures, that fact by itself does not seem to make much of these alleged special pieces of evidence encrypted in the Chinese writing. There actually are, we are told, clear references to eight people on an ark during a great flood, with the ark eventually lodging in the side of a large mountain, and the eight people becoming the ancestors of all subsequent humanity. I already mentioned yesterday that what they read as the number "8," according to the people carrying credentials in the Chinese language, is actually a phonetic marker that has nothing to do with the number. From this point on, I will focus on the article by Kui Shin Voo, Rich Sheeley, and Larry Hovee, "Noah's Ark hidden in the ancient Chinese characters" Journal of Creation (Previously: TJ) 19,2 (August 2005):96-108, which you can follow online .

The authors of the aforementioned article went further than other sites I've come across insofar as they actually tried to correlate the the story embedded in the characters with ancient Chinese mythology. It is at this point that their wagon goes totally off the track. They acknowledge that their analysis does not always suit the results attained by Chinese scholars. (I'm not sure whether by that term they mean scholars endemic to China or scholars of the Chinese language; the point would hold up in either case.) It is worth quoting this statement at length:

Some of our interpretations of these characters and radicals differ from those of Chinese scholars for an important reason. The scholars did not put forth a complete story of how the characters originated. Their analyses and interpretations are also devoted to each individual character. In contrast, we analyzed all the characters that are associated with the flood, eight persons, and boat in the context of ancient Chinese and Hebrew stories to extract a complete story behind the origin of those characters. (p. 105)

It appears to me that with this statement the authors have given away their agenda of deliberately re-interpreting the characters in the light of their project to find Genesis in Chinese writing.

To be more specific, here are some detailed points that emerge from their reconstruction and adaptation:

1. There was an "ark." Ultimately, a big boat with eight people and some animals on it, still is not entirely synonymous with our picture of the ark, which was more of a floating rescue box. They come to the conclusion that there was an ark with some rather forced-looking analysis of some characters and, ultimately, through an inference. They conclude that the flood represented in the hidden pictures of the characters must have been so huge that it even covered the mountains. Thus, in order for any humans to survive, there must have been at least a platform that floated above all mountains. (This is actually a good point for the defense of the biblical account, once you accept the historical reality of the universal flood as described in Genesis, and that not all human beings perished.)

   However, this understanding of the flood is at odds with the mythology of the Chinese themselves. According to their own version of the story, the flood did not cover all of the mountains. In fact, there was a famous hero named Yu, who should not be confused with either Yu-huang, the jade emperor or with Yu, the first king of the mythological Xia dynasty. The "Great Hero Yu" instructed the people on how to survive on the mountain top and taught them agriculture. He is sometimes worshipped as an agricultural deity, and is widely known to outsiders as the “Chinese Noah.” But he had no vessel floating on the waters, so that appellation is also gratuitous and misleading.

2. Voo, et. al, however, have another candidate to play the role of Noah. After describing the calamity of a flood that was, according to them, caused by a rebellious group of people (not gods--see below), the four poles that held up the roof of the world were crushed, and the world became inundated with water from above and below. Then:

In the midst of this global calamity, a hero by the name of ‘Nüwa’ (女媧) appeared and sealed the flood holes with colourful stones and repaired the broken poles using four turtle legs.  Nüwa used earth to create humans to replenish mankind after the flood. Although the name Nüwa (女 媧), in Chinese, may today sound like a female first name, at that time it was a common surname. (p. 97, emphasis mine).

As an aside, it is remarkable how the authors treat the legends of the pre-historic periods as historical documents when it suits their purpose. A statement along the line of Nüwa being a common surname at that time is insupportable since we certainly do not have any reliable census records. For the most part, the author's references, other than to a dictionary, are to other writers who share their point of view. The truth is that there are many variations on this legendary pre-history, including the identity of the mythological Three Sovereign Deities and Five Divine Emperors who were supposed to have ruled back then, and to make any claims as to the names found in the general population, is to cross the line between what can possibly count as acceptable evidence and what cannot.  The name Nüwa certainly has the advantage of sounding a lot like "Noah." Later on, the authors state,

Interestingly, a story embedded in the Chinese legendary period preceding the first Dynasty (2205 BC) describes a person by the name 'Nüwa’ who turned back a catastrophic flood that covered the whole world. Given the very close similarity between the two accounts, we believe they represent the same event [as the biblical account]. (p. 99 emphasis mine)



It is at this point that one begins to question whether the intent has not entirely replaced sound scholarly judgment. Unless one rewrites the legends attributed to pre-historical China, the idea of any "close similarity between the two accounts" is unintelligible. Please keep in mind that I'm favoring the notion of remnants of an original monotheism being present in ancient Chinese culture, but you just can't get there from the pagan culture that replaced it. Nüwa is, and always has been, a goddess. Some people include her among the first Three Sovereigns, but that's a regional matter. She did not create the world, but she created human beings--prior to the flood--and protected them by undoing the flood and fighting threatening creatures afterwards. 

I'm assuming that the authors reversed the order of creation-by-Nüwa and the flood because they wanted to preserve the notion of Shangdi as the original creator of human beings. Unfortunately, that's not how it reads, and we need to accept that the mythological deities were here, as everywhere, displacing the true Creator God. To do otherwise is to create retroactively a syncretism that never existed historically. Apostasy is universal. 

Now here is where I really get bothered. Even though the authors make the statement that Nüwa was a common surname in the third millennium BC, and even though they try to equate her with Noah, they never use a personal pronoun in reference to her, probably because doing so would just have flown totally in the face of the common knowledge that she was female, and they mention some things she is supposed to have done without giving us a good summary of the mythology associated with her. Of course, to do so, would ruin their case.  It seems at times that we are supposed to come away with the idea that she, being "Noah," was one of the eight people on the alleged ark. However, they never state so outright, and they actually make that scenario impossible with another outrageous inference, to which we will come presently.

So, please allow me to clarify who Nüwa actually was in the mythology, and what she was supposed to have done. The best thing I know to do at this point is to give you a more exact form of the story by quoting directly from a Chinese children's book, published in the People's Republic. (Chinese Myths, Shanghai, China, no date).The advantage of using the children's book is that the stories are kept short, and you get a good summary of the relevant names and events in their correct order. Plus, it gives you a clear picture what is being transmitted as a part of Chinese folklore. And, I must add, even though, as I mentioned above, there are many variations, they give us a basic skeleton that crosses regional boundaries. Furthermore, when it comes to the central characters, Pan Gu and Nüwa, you're not going to find totally different stories concerning them in some hidden set of documents.

We must begin with the story of Pan Gu, the giant, who is in some ways reminiscent of Purusha in India or Izanagi in Japan. There is no resemblance to Shangdi or Yahweh, nor should there be. And, by the way, the transliteration of Nüwa in these paragraphs is the alternate Na Wu, but I'm going to substitute Nüwa so as not to compound any possible confusion.

"Aeons ago, heaven and earth were commingled like a big egg. Inside the "egg" was a man named Pan Gu, who kept growing slowly until he became a giant of 90,000 miles high. Pan Gu slept for 18,000 years, but one day he woke up. Pan Gu opened his eyes but all he could see was darkness. Feeling bored, he picked up an axe and swung it. Boom! The big "egg" was split into two parts. The lighter part rose and became heaven. The heavier part sank and became earth. Pan Gu feared that heaven and earth would reunite, so he stood up and propped them apart like a pillar. Tens of thousands years later, heaven was so high it was impossible for it to reunite with earth. Pan Gu was exhausted by then so he slumped to the ground. Pan Gu was dead. His left eye became the sun and his right eye the moon. His body turned into mountains. His blood became rivers and his hair turned into trees and flowers. His bones became metals and hard rocks, and his sweat produced rain and dew.

"Nüwa was a goddess and one day she arrived in the world created by Pan Gu. As she traveled across mountains and rivers, she decided that something should be added to enliven the new world. When Nüwa felt tired, she sat down by the side of a pond, which reflected her figure like a mirror. Wouldn't it be nice to make something living like me? she thought. Nüwa then began to mould a doll very carefully with water and mud. The clay figure became alive the minute it was put on the ground. He could walk, jump, and speak. Nüwa called him 'human being.' Ah! This was the first human being. Nüwa moulded more clay figures and each one became alive. Moulding clay figures took a lot of time so she picked a rattan and dipped into the mud. Afterwards, each drip of mud which fell from the rattan turned into a human being when it touched the ground. After a while, she divided the human beings into men and women, got them to marry and have children. Thus the new world was alive with human beings.

"Gong Gong was a ferocious water god and one day he started a war upon Zhu Rong, a fire god. The two fought from heaven to earth. Gong Gong and his men took a big raft to challenge Zhu Rong. The water god, who was assisted by fish, shrimp and crabs, raised wind and waves. But Zhu Rong was even more fierce and tough. He hit back with raging flames and Gong Gong's troops were seriously burnt. Shamed by his defeat, Gong Gong decided to take his life. He knocked his head against Mount Buzhou in the West. Mount Buzhou was a pillar of heaven. It was broken by Gong Gong. Half the sky fell down. The forest caught fire, great torrents gushed out from underground and the land was turned into a vast ocean. People were either burnt to death or drowned. Gong Gong brought catastrophe to human beings.

[It is at this point in the myth that the Great Hero Yu and a few other people found safety on a mountain top.]

"Nüwa was deeply grieved when she saw the people she created suffering, so she decided to mend the sky. She collected many coloured stones from the rivers and lakes and melted them into magma.  She patched up the cavity of the sky bit by bit. When she saw a giant turtle, she killed it and cut off its four feet. Do you know why? She was afraid that the sky would fall down once more, so she used the turtle's legs as pillars to prop up the sky.  Afterwards, she drove away the fierce birds and ferocious animal and when she found a black dragon in the Central Plains that often harmed people, she quickly killed it. Nüwa then burned reeds into ashes and used them to stop the spreading flood. By doing this, she saved the remaining people from disaster."

I'm sorry if quoting this entire summary was long and tedious, but how else can I make clear to you that the phrase, "given the very close similarity between the two accounts," is utterly bogus. The accounts aren't even close, let alone very close, and I don't see how the authors could have missed that fact or made that judgment unless they were deliberately stating some points and intentionally withholding others to make things come out the way that they wanted them to. Even if we were to concede the entire character-within-character methodology and that their conclusions were right (and we don't), Nüwa as Noah is still impossible

3. But there is still another highly problematic matter in the article. Who were the eight people on the ark? If Nüwa really had been a counterpart to Noah, she (or her imaginary male version) should have been one of them, but, of course, she wasn't.  Voo et. al. conclude that the eight persons on board the ark were the "Eight Immortals" of Daoist legend. The following statement immediately precedes the reference to the "very close similarity" to the biblical narrative and is included in that judgment.

   According to Taoist stories, there were eight immortals that crossed the sea on a ship:  two women and six men. The Hebrew Scriptures describe Noah’s family as having eight members, namely Noah, his wife and three sons, and three daughters-in-law.  They were the only eight persons that survived the Flood. (p. 12)

   Please recollect that it is a definite point of dispute whether the character for "8" as meaning the number 8 is actually present in the character for "boat." And when you come right down to it, the number 8 is about all that the Eight Immortals and the eight members of Noah's group have in common. Not too long ago, I brought up the Eight Immortals on this blog, as I attempted to ascertain their identities on a picture in Taiwan, which (unsurprisingly) led to a somewhat longer study. Click here or on the stitched-together mural composite below for the complete round-up!

   This identification is highly-farfetched, and even the authors show ambivalence. From another character they infer that one of the people on the ark may have been the emperor, whom they identify as a righteous person. In that case, it would appear to me that they made the emperor one of the Eight Immortals, thereby definitely rewriting Chinese mythology. If not, I'm totally buffaloed as to what they're trying to say.  Here is a part of their reasoning:

   The clever association of eight mouths, rather than eight men or women, strongly suggests that Noah’s family, or the eight immortals, were indeed on the ship.  The description of the emperor or the eight worshippers on the ship matches the situation on Noah’s Ark, which also consisted of a righteous worshipper, Noah, and a total of eight family members. Noah’s family was the remnant of the human race reserved for the preservation of mankind.  In contrast, the eight immortals in the Taoist account were merely eight ‘holy men’ of unknown origin. (p. 101)

   This combination of claims is so confused that it is hard to know where to begin to respond to it. Why the putdown of the Baxian at the end of the paragraph? The above link provides information as to the identity of the Eight Immortals (Baxian) in the mythology. If you pursue the mythology more closely, they were hardly righteous people. So, a negative judgment in contrast to Noah is appropriate, but what about the paeons of praise right above it? Let me list some other aspects that are a part of the mythology of the Eight Immortals:

   a. They did cross the sea, but not by boat. Returning from a lengthy birthday party for the goddess of the Western Paradise, they were still in a state of inebriation when it came time to cross the sea. Lü Dong Bin suggested that, instead of using a boat, each of them should cross the sea with their particular special powers. They attempted to do so, but ran into conflict with the Dragon King of the sea because his mother snatched up Lan Cai He and his flowers. We don't need to pursue the rest of the story here. The point is that one starts with a mistake if one assumes that their crossing of the sea must have involved a boat.

   b. Were the Baxian "eight holy men of unknown origin"? Well, no. Lü Dong Bin was a scholar who lived in the 8th century BC--long after the flood, obviously. We don't have historical confirmation of any of the others, but they all have their "stories" incorporated in the mythology. Dismissive statements such as the above tend to indicate to me that someone did not do their homework. Of course, the article already mentioned earlier that this group of eight consisted of six men and two women. Actually, the more common configuration is seven men and one woman, but I have seen both. What they have in common is that they are representative of the Daoist preoccupation in their day to find the key to personal immortality, usually through some form of alchemy, and these eight disparate people had succeeded. Having attained immortality did not necessarily improve their morality or disposition; hence the somewhat dismissive note by our authors is not inappropriate, as I mentioned.

   But then, why bring in the Eight Immortals into this segment at all, particularly since I'm not telling you anything that one couldn't find out by the most cursory survey of Chinese mythology? I really can't say, at least not without raising some hard questions. What I feel pressed to say is that, in their eagerness to find the alleged data derived from the characters exemplified in Chinese mythology, they simply picked up whatever they could scrunch in, being pretty sure that their reading public would not go to a lot of trouble checking out what they were saying. I mean, once you talk about oracle bones and then bring up supposedly enigmatic figures like Nüwa, whose name so uncannily resembles that of Noah, who's going to question you? And if someone should, it's always possible to accuse the objector of nitpicking. As I keep insisting, it is imperative that contemporary evangelicals learn about Eastern religions. The alternative is that we are either embarassing or deceiving ourselves or others.

The approach about which I wrote last night ("stories embedded in writing characters" seemed to me to be somewhat dubious, and I would suggest that people don't use it as a good argument in apologetics. The subject matter for today included some obvious misdirections in order to bring off what I would consider a very obvious attempt at "colonization." I find this very troublesome. The identities of Nüwa and of the Eight Immortals are so obvious in the world of Chinese legends, that I find it difficult to believe that the authors weren't aware of those facts, though in that case they must have intentionally bent them to add plausibility to their argument. This does nobody any good. 

Then again, I remember someone delivering a paper at a conference in which he claimed that there was no personal supreme God in historical Chinese religion. When I asked him afterwards, what he made of Shangdi, he conceded that he had never heard of him, a fact that did not prevent him from giving me a lecture on the improbability of original monotheism. So, maybe it's all just ignorance. But still, in that case it's a prideful manipulative ignorance, and that still bothers me.  

I was tempted to call this entry "junk apologetics," cleverly referring to the Chinese sail ship because this item comes to us (like Suzanne's tea and  oranges) all the way from China. But then I thought better of it.

Before getting started, let me comment on the obvious for the moment. As you can see, I have changed colors again. Though I really liked that dark blue background with white typeface, I have realized that when one changes the pattern for one entry one does so for all of them, going back to the remote past, so that all of the writing went white. This switch did not cause too many problems, except for all the yellow insert tables, which became unreadable.  In addition, btw, I've also been able to change the color of the links inside the Google Search box, so that they are now readable.

I will start out on this topic by going through a historical back door. The famous Rosetta stone was first discovered by Europeans in 1799. As one of Napoleon's souvenirs of his misadventure in Egypt, it became England's possession when that country helped move the annoying Corsican out of Africa,  and the stone wound up on public display in London in 1802. There it became a center of attraction for scholars from all over Europe to copy it, make imprints of it, do whatever it would take to go home and decipher the hieroglyphics on this rock. Up to that point, although hieroglyphics had been known for quite a while, no one had been able to figure out their meaning. Some people concluded that they had no meaning; others thought that they had found the key and published translations of various inscriptions with content that would make the pharaohs crawl back out of their pyramids. Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) finally brought it off in 1822 after some intense study and forcing himself to rethink the presuppositions that were leading everyone else into either abject failure or just plain nonsense. What Champollion advocated, and what earned him a certain amount of scorn at first, was to get away from the idea that the hieroglyphics were a form of picture writing.

Pure picture-writing ("pictographs") would be little caricatures representing the words for particular objects.  So, if you drew a picture of a man with a spear, that could mean "man with a spear" or "hunter," and if you drew a representation of a  buffalo, you might be expressing the word "buffalo." I trust you're following me here. Now, if you drew the two pictures next to each other, they could mean "a man with a spear and a buffalo," or they could contribute to each other's meaning and combine to represent the word "hunt" or the idea of hunting. If you did so regularly, you might have created a new character in the script for your language, an ideograph, viz. a picture that represents, not just an object, but an idea.

But now we get to the hard part for would-be decoders of a pictorial alphabet: There comes a time in the life of a script when the pictures no longer mean what they are picturing. They turn into letters of an alphabet or phonemes of a syllabet. So, you might see a falcon, but whatever role the picture of the falcon may play in the newly developed form of writing, may not have anything to do with birds of prey. This is where the scholars trying to decipher the Rosetta Stone got hung up, even though it was practically an "interlinear," providing translations of essentially the same message in Demotic script (Egyptian writing from around the Ptolemaic era) and in classical Greek. Only when Champollion had totally weaned himself off the idea of all the little pictures representing objects, that he made the break-through.

Let the above serve as an introduction to the issue I'm about to take up, which is the theory that certain ancient Chinese characters were composed in such a way that they contain an account paralleling Genesis 1-11. Now, I won't try to pretend to be an expert on Chinese, and I will attempt to limit myself to what I do know. In the foreword to the seminal book for this discussion, Paul A. Zimmerman states, "Among the book's virtues is that it can be read with appreciation and understanding by those who are neither students of language nor conversant with Chinese."  So, according to the book, I'm competent to appreciate and understand it, and I assume that if those are possible, then it's also permissible to comment on the parts that I understand but can't quite bring myself to appreciate.  I'm concerned with linguistic patterns and mythology, and, actually, being able to converse in Chinese would not help one way or the other for this discussion.

The theory to which I'm referring has been around for more than half a century now, but I first learned about it when brother Wolf sent me an article concerning it and asked me what I thought of it. I gave him a hopefully nicely qualified answer and thought I was done with the matter. Then I realized that the book by Chan Kei Thong, Finding God in Ancient China (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009) has devoted some space to it. So, I recently asked a friend in Singapore if he was familiar with it, and he not only was, but gave me some more sources. Then I got really curious, and over the last couple of days spent a bit of time chasing down more information, finding that a lot of people have taken it up as a part of their apologetics arsenal.

Some time before 1950, C. H. Kang, a chaplain at a missionary hospital in China, was stumped for external corroboration of the Genesis account. He thought that he had finally discovered some when, in a Mandarin dictionary, he learned that the Chinese character for "boat" consisted of a combination of three other characters: "vessel," "mouth" (meaning a person), and the number "8." Thus, the original character for "boat" made reference to eight people on a vessel--what an amazing vestigial memory of Noah and his family on the ark! The illustration below comes from the Genesis Website.

Inspired by this insight, he discovered quite a few more and self-published a small book in Hong Kong, entitled Genesis and the Chinese. A retired medical missionary, Ethel R. Nelson, eventually collaborated with Pastor Kang on a more elaborate book, called The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of Genesis Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Language, published in 1979 by Concordia Press in St. Louis. Since then, their work has been incorporated by quite a few apologists, particularly by some groups whose reason for existence is defending the truth of Genesis and its creation account. Here is another example. Let's look at the alleged etymology of the ancient Chinese word for creation. We have to proceed in two steps. First, we add the signs for "dust," "breath," and "alive," which yields "to talk."

Then, when we combine "to talk" with "walking," the newly emerged compound character is the one that means "to create."

Thus, an analysis of the character for "creation" tells the story of Adam: He was made from the dust of the earth and became alive when God put his breath into him. So, now he became a talking and walking being, and that's what creation is all about: making a new being who is alive, starting with nothing but dirt. Let these two examples stand for the many that Nelson and Kang believe they had found, paralleling the biblical stories of creation, the creation of the first woman, the fall, the flood, leading right up to the disaster of the Tower of Babel. All of these stories were supposedly encrypted in the ancient Chinese characters. The authors considered this phenomenon to be a wonderful support of the Genesis account because here a culture that was totally different from the Hebrews had preserved the biblical narrative with remarkable accuracy. Of course, after the Tower of Babel, the Chinese moved east, and so we shouldn't expect any further parallels to Genesis, though some people claim other similarities in fundamental religious concepts of the Chinese people and the Hebrews.

Now, I'm going to raise some critical questions, but let me first enumerate as much as I can think of that I share with the advocates of this theory. I accept the historicity and facticity of Genesis 1-11. I believe that a good case can be made that Shangdi, ancient god of China, is the God of original monotheism, viz. the one and only true God. I'm quite sure that there is good evidence that a religion resembling that of the early Hebrews at a minimum can be extrapolated from the information we have as having been practiced in ancient China.

However, I'm not sure that the case for early Old Testament narratives being embedded in Chinese writing can be substantiated with plausibility.

Now, I need to write with caution here, lest I overstep my own bounds of expertise. However, I have mentioned, and will continue to mention the occupations of those who are advocating this theory. There doesn't seem to be a linguist in the bunch. In fact I want to zero in on one article to which my friend in Singapore pointed me: Kui Shin Voo, Rich Sheeley, and Larry Hovee, "Noah's Ark hidden in the ancient Chinese characters" Journal of Creation (Previously: TJ) 19,2 (August 2005):96-108. These three authors are respectively a Ph.D. in genetics, an evangelist to the Chinese people in Singapore, and an architect. I'm not saying this to impugn their work or their conclusions; I'm merely trying to close the door on anyone questioning my credentials for engaging with the issue.

There's a basic principle in linguistics that the etymology of a word or sign cannot disclose the true meaning of the word. It can give us some worthwhile insights into how language has changed, but it cannot make a word mean in the present what it used to mean or derive insights into its present meaning from its supposed constituent parts.

Here's what just now happened: Without having any idea of what I might encounter, I thought I would see if there was a good example of this principle in English. So, the word "pedigree" just popped into my head and I looked up the "Wiktionary" article on the word "pedigree." Lo and behold, I couldn't find a better example. A pedigree is, of course, a term for a person's or animal's genetic descent. But the word stems from a combination of two Latin words, namely, as the article presented it, pedem and gruem, (why use the accusative case?) meaning "foot" and "crane" respectively. Thus, the original compound word was "foot of a crane." This is fascinating, and I wonder how the change in meaning came about, but it is totally irrelevant to the meaning of "pedigree" in contemporary English. And, yes, in Chinese we find some truly astounding transformations of the meanings of words as well. See Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought (New York: Grove, 1958), pp. 59-68 for some good examples. So, one could object to the point that I'm trying to make here by asking, Doesn't it help to limit the words you analyze to the most ancient ones, as Voo et. al., have attempted to do? Not really because in looking at even the most ancient characters, you are still stipulating a pre-history in which that character was supposedly assembled.

Furthermore--and here I can do no more than rely on what the linguists are saying--not every part of a Chinese character is representational. A skeptical website  points out that:

According to DeFrancis (1984), the vast majority of Chinese characters (83% of those in common use based on an analysis by Chen Heqin) are phonetic compounds of this type. For example, the character 媽, used to mean 'mother', is composed of the elements 女 'woman' and 馬 'horse'. While the component meaning 'woman' hints that the character has something to do with women, the component meaning 'horse' in fact establishes pronunciation - both the 'mother' and 'horse' morphemes are pronounced /ma/, albeit with different tones.

So, for example, the supposed "8" in the character for "boat" is actually there as a phonetic guide, not as the number 8.

 William Wu of Berkeley takes a relatively generous approach:

Many Chinese characters can be interpreted so that you see whatever you want. It's like looking at clouds. However, there do exist particular interpretations that are probably correct -- ones that reflect the intentions of the character's maker. Etymological dictionaries can be researched to find these correct interpretations, which are derived from studies of character evolvement over time. The fact that I've seen many characters whose standard etymological interpretations conflict with Kang's suggests to me that Kang may have conjured many interpretations out of his own volition. Admittedly, some of the interpretations seem very convincing; however, some others are just laughable.

He concludes by quoting the appropriate proverb, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." 

For a truly technical summary that really takes the air out of much of the dissection of Chinese characters into self-contained components, there is a good piece by Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. It focuses on a different Chinese character, but then generalizes the subject matter at the end so that Kang, Nelson, and others who pursue similar notions can also be accommodated to his correction. 

Now, I have to tell you that I would probably not have bothered writing any of the above tonight if some people did not take this issue a step further, but I won't get to that step tonight any more. I do think that it's a mistake in Christian apologetics to use one side of a rather debatable issue as evidence for the truth of the Bible, but it appears that there will always be people who attempt to do so, and, sadly, frequently doing so leads to the exclusion of fellowship with other believers, who are not ready to step on their shaky board. One gets used to that. However, it's the "further step" to which I alluded above that really burns my toast because--I almost said, "it verges on being," but that's probably too understated--it is downright deceptive.

I'll tell you about that part in the next entry.  

First, a little mini-survey; I'd like some honest answers that provide me with some reassurance that I'm not the only one who does things like this--or perhaps I am. Last night June and I went out to get into the Dakota, which was parked in the driveway, about to head to Nick and Meghan's for dinner. The truck was locked. Whoops! I had left the truck keys in the house. Double-whoops! The house was locked, and the house key and truck key are on the same chain.----Don't we have duplicates?----Well, actually, I never got them remade after the time in August when my keys were shredded by the tractor. ---- So, one could call a locksmith if one knew such a number, and if one had one's cell phone at hand.

In short, here's the question:

How many folks out there have ever burgled their own house because they locked in their keys?

The old song "She Came Through the Bathroom Window" took on new meaning. For one thing it was a "he." For another, the song doesn't mention anything about cutting and nailing up a plywood board after the unorthodox entry. I tried to save the pane, but it was no use.  One thing is certain.  Our neighbors, taking occasional glimpses from their upstairs, must have been thoroughly puzzled as to what we were doing just as it was getting dark.

Tonight we're at Seth and Amber's. We just finished watching the DVD of Judy Collins and some old friends of hers at the Wildflower Festival. We started the DVD last night at Nick and Meghan's, but didn't finish it because we had gotten their rather late, and it's a long DVD.   So today we watched it all over again. That will undoubtedly happen many times more, by which I mean that I anticipate re-watching it and re-listening to it numerous times. Each of the featured performers, Harvard graduate Tom Rush, Norwegian-born songwriter Eric Andersen, and Arlo Guthrie, the family man,  got to do one set; Judy, of course got two--one in the beginning and one at the end. Then, to close out, they all joined together for some numbers. The performers basically worked coffee house style, viz. without bands. Judy had a back-up piano player, and she played the piano as well her twelve-string guitar. Ditto for Arlo; he played either the guitar or the piano, and he was accompanied the entire time by his son Abe on the electric keyboard. Tom and Eric were totally solo (until the end, of course) with Eric alternating between piano and guitar, and Tom showing us all how much better we could be on the guitar if we had his talent or worked harder at it.

They engaged in a bit of reminiscing about their time in "the village," and it took me back in three directions: for one, being in the "village" in 1967 before it went seedy;  second, seeing and hearing these people decades ago at the old Carter Baron Theater in Washington, D.C.  I wonder if that place is still standing. Peter Yarrow used to call it the "Cricket Theater," not because of the sport, but because of the back ground sounds provided by the insects of late summer. The third direction was back to my own little slice of the folk world--returning all the way to when brother Wolf and I used to play regularly at the "Pilgrim's Cave." When would that have started? 1966 maybe? Folk music played a significant role in integrating ourselves into American culture. Then, of course, I think of the many gigs brother Ralph and I had (a few with, most without L. K., at whose encouragement I got my electric bass) before he had to go back to Germany, a pleasure now revived informally when we get the chance.  And "Thirsty Boots," one of the last songs, will always bring back memories of singing it with J.H.

After that, there were the long Friday nights at Rahab's, followed by the seemingly even longer Friday and Saturday nights at the "Natural High." Then came the performances at Taylor's "coffee houses," and, most importantly, the church basement circuit. But slowly folk music was becoming a throw-back, and--like original rock'n'roll-- it turned its most popular superficial appeal over to Nashville. As far as I'm concerned, the church-basement circuit is not necessarily over and done, but I wouldn't be able to do lengthy sets as I used to. Regardless, the folk music of the sixties should not get lost in today's trend of substituting appearance for skill.

As far as other things go, life continues in its standard fashion. I've been able to get some projects done, which makes me feel good, but that means that some other projects are yet undone.  Please pray for my dad who will have back surgery on Monday (German time).

		Bible Reading: 2 Kings 23:31-35
v. 34: Then Pharaoh Neco made Eliakim son of Josiah king in place of his father Josiah and changed Eliakim’s name to Jehoiakim. But Neco took Jehoahaz and went to Egypt, and he died there. (HCSB)

For some reason, Pharaoh Neco was not pleased with the fact that Jehoahaz had taken Josiah's place in becoming king of Judah. Now, there were some unusual circumstances surrounding his selection. Josiah had an older son, Eliakim, who would presumably have been the most natural person to inherit the throne. (Look at the ages mentioned in vv. 31 & 36: Jehoahaz was 23 years old at his coronation, and three months later, when Eliakim came to the throne, the latter was 25 years old.) In contrast to being designated as king by the powerful people of Jerusalem or a prophet, let alone based on a word from the Lord, our passage states that it was the "common people" who chose Jeoahaz to be their new ruler. There are two questions that come to mind. One is why the people were so strongly involved in king-selection, and why they chose Jehoahaz. Okay, that's two questions already, so it'll be a total of three (at least). I don't have a good answer to the first question, except that perhaps things were so confused that if the people hadn't made a move, it could have come to violence between the brothers. That's just a guess, and the answer to the second question (why specifically Jehoahaz?) is not much better. The only possible reason that I can see is that he had given clear indications that he would not stick to Josiah's reforms. There is no question that, as soon as Jehoahaz topped his head with the crown and waved the green flag, the people wasted no time restoring their idols, unclean altars, and pagan practices.  In a mere three months, he seems to have managed to undo pretty much all that Josiah had done, mostly because he did not have to do it. All he needed to do was to give the people permission to go back to their pre-Josiah way of living.

The third question (formerly the second) is why Neco did not want Jehoahaz to be king. I have no good answer here either. I can speculate that somehow Jehoahaz had committed himself to continue Josiah's unwise anti-Neco policy. It could even be possible, given his further actions, that, in line with the superstitions at the time, Neco did not want someone on Judah's throne who was not loyal to the God of Judah. He encountered Jehoahaz at "Riblah in the land of Hamath" and laid him in chains there. We find that location in Mesopotamia, so we must wonder what Jehoahaz was doing there (a fourth question).  Perhaps either Neco had commanded him to come up there, or Jehoahaz had actually marched up an army, possibly to renew the warfare against Neco. Regardless, Neco, who had himself been installed by Ashurbanipal of Assyria while all other candidates were killed, now un-crowned Jehoahaz. He did not want him to be king. In fact, he did not like him very much. To be totally frank about it, he really detested him. Neco took Jehoahaz prisoner and transported him to Egypt. In Ezekiel 19:3-4, the event is described figuratively as resembling a lion cub being removed with hooks. If the Egyptians had learned cruelty from the Assyrians, those hooks could also have been applied literally to Jehoahaz. As prophesied by Jeremiah 22:11-12, Jehoahaz died there a short while later.

But who would now be king of Judah? If you're keeping count, this is a fifth question, and I am posing it because it's finally one I can answer confidently. The answer is that Neco designated Eliakim, the older brother to be the king. Again, to the unasked question of why him specifically, I would have no answer, so I won't even ask it. However, Neco made another intriguing move: He also provided a new twist to Eliakim's name. "Eliakim" means "God has established." We see the generic word for God, "El," in this name. But Neco insisted that it should become Jehoiakim, meaning specifically "Yahweh has established."

Furthermore, Neco imposed a fairly heavy fine on Judah: 7,500 pounds of silver and 75 pounds of gold. Jehoiakim was cooperative in a way that one wishes modern politicians would be. He readily complied and pulled the coins out of his own treasury. (Wouldn't it be nice if our elected leaders paid with their own money for programs that we don't want, but wind up paying for? [This is not really a question.]) But no, that's not what Neco had in mind. He wanted all of Judah to feel the sting, and he commanded Jehoiakim to put his gold and silver back again; he wanted that money raised through taxation. Once again, Jehoiakim followed orders.

If anyone thought that Jehoiakim would be a better influence on the land than his younger brother would have been, they were mistaken. He, too, had no interest in maintaining (or, by now, restoring) the reforms brought about by Josiah, and the deterioration continued.

The catch in this story is that, regardless of what lengths either Neco or Jehoiakim went to in order to be players in the political affairs of the world, God had a different plan altogether, and neither one of them would be able to put a stop to it. But, as we shall detail next time by looking a little beyond 2 Kings, Jehoiakim certainly tried to oppose God. Doing so, as we continue to stress, is always an indication of highly uninformed thinking.

Here it is, the last day of 2011, New Year's Eve, the evening that is dedicated to eating pizza rolls and reminiscing about the past year. I probably wouldn't remember a whole lot about it, if I didn't have this blog to consult. Unfortunately, going back and looking at the entries from January on, it appears that there are long stretches for which there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to remember, a lot of routine days of working on projects and trying to find stability in life, alternating with incredible high points. A few deep low points as well. As I'm going to provide a quick review, I may mention a few details that I didn't want to disclose at the time of the original post. I'll also mention some of the blog series, which frequently took the place of regular study of 2 Kings, and I'll include some  musical arrangements and videos as well.

January

• 2011 started out with an enormous amount of snow, eventually giving way to a lot of storms in the spring and summer. But, earlier on, it seemed as though there was not a single day without some snow falling. Somewhere around the beginning of the year, I started working with a Taylor University graduate student on his M.A. thesis. We met regularly pretty much every week, and he came up with a good project on Kalki, the Hindu avatar of the future.
• The Holman Commentary on Chronicles came out in Korean.
• The video on Basic Christian Teaching made it onto YouTube, paralleling the one on Basic Buddhist Teaching.
• I posted a short series on the magi.
• Musical postings included arrangements of "Do Lord" and "Finlandia" ("Be Still My Soul," "We Rest on Thee," etc.

February

• I started my four or five sessions with the Taylor class on the Integration of Faith and Learning for new faculty. As as always that was a good experience.
• In this month I also started the blog series on Hegel, which ran for quite a while off and on.  As it turned out, I did not finish it until July or so.

 

 

March

The first major highlight: June and I traveled to Topeka, Kansas, where I held a workshop on the Bible in comparison and contrast with the scriptures of other religions.  The sessions went well, and we made some great new friends. While visiting the Topeka capital, some of the exhibits stimulated my thinking to do some more explorations on the Native American experience in Kansas, which gave rise to a short series on the trip, mostly dedicated to the history of the Indians involved.

April

Sometime in March or late February, June and I officially filed bankruptcy papers. We thank God for an excellent law firm that helped us through the process. We managed to keep the house and the Dodge Dakota, thanks to their competence. Still, it was not a happy experience on the whole. The final court hearing coincided with the annual national meeting of ISCA, the International Society of Christian Apologetics. We were very sorry to miss it, but our absence was obviously unavoidable.

May

• A few days later we took our first major trip to the East Coast. We spent about two weeks in Columbia, SC, at brother Ralph's, where my dad was staying on a visit from Germany. We went to Charleston and took the traditional carriage ride, as well as to the North Carolina mountains, Ralph's favorite area for escaping into the wilderness. Ralph and I also made a lot of music together, which really lifted my soul.
Then, we left for a quick excursion to Greensborough, and then back down to Charlotte, where we stayed with Norm and Barb Geisler. I got to give a presentation at Community Fellowship Church and established some good relationships that have continued since and hopefully will last all of our lives.
Soon after we had returned home, there was a massive storm, which dropped several large branches from the willow tree in our back yard.

June

Right around then, I also realized that I was developing a very annoying skin condition, which lasted deeply into July and, for the most part, kept me indoors for much of the summer.
Before the skin problem got too bad, for June's birthday, Nick and Megan took us (June, Seth, Amber, and me) to the Fort Wayne conservatory. My camera had stopped working in South Carolina, so I only had a phone cam, but I managed to put together a video, which I particularly like because of the tune in the background. I call it "Little Old Rock."

July

There was not much happening in July. I was pretty much confined to the house. Because of the risk of contagion, June and I did our own little Fourth of July celebration.
We did sneak in a lightning visit to June's mom in Michigan.
I was really glad when the doctor cleared me to be in the public again. During the rest of the summer, I played a guessing game whether the Alexandria public swimming pool would be open or not, and enjoyed it when it was.

August

In early August, we enjoyed the annual visit of our friends, Scott and Jana M. and their two daughters.
I was able to start cleaning up the yard, which had taken on the character of a secondary rainforest regrowth.
At the end of the month, June spent a few weeks at Seth and Amber's kennel to learn the procedures so that she could fill in while S&A went to Florida to pick up a new Great Dane puppy. During the five days or so that they were gone, we lived in their house.

• September

• I finished the yard clean-up, or so I thought.
• I began a series on the blog on Old Testament criticism, which got left to the side by a few entries on genre criticism. Eventually, I'll get back to the OT topic.
• I posted my arrangement of Peace in the Valley.

   Peace in the Valley

• We left for our long trip, from which we wouldn't return until November, on September 29.

October

 
Our first destination was Cherokee, NC, for an apologetics conference. Then we spent a short time hanging around the Charlotte area, after which we headed up to Boston.
In Boston, I preached at Hope International Church, and we met with the two web-based ministry groups. From there, June, Wyatt, and I took off for Bangkok, Thailand and Singapore for as much first-hand study of Theravada Buddhism as we could manage.
Over the time of that trip, I was designated to take over as editor for the journal of ISCA.
Nick informed us by e-mail that in our absence there had been another massive storm, and about half of the willow tree had fallen, with the trunk straddling the garage roof and back porch cover. There was no damage to the structures, and Nick did a good job restoring some order, but not before the home insurance underwriters came on their inspection visit and were unfavorably impressed.
The blog entries for the trip are confusing at this point. They consist of two sets, first occasional entries during the trip, followed by a lengthy sequence of "reflections" on the trip, starting over in chronological order. Collating these entries into a coherent whole is on my agenda.
We arrived back in Boston on October 29th to a serious snow-and-ice storm.

November

After a long and careful drive, we got back home in Indiana on November 2nd.
Once we got back home and the much colder climate than the tropics we had just visited, my PD problems have a lot more aggravated.
We went to see the whippets perform at agility training with Seth and Amber.
We had a great Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat with both couples at Seth and Amber's on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend.

December

Struggling with serious depletions of energy and depression. On the whole, though, making progress on various projects.
In the middle of the month, we spend a "four-day" weekend at cousin Ruth's in Bay City to help her get ready to move to Grand Rapids.
Having been rather delinquent in making blog posts, and not having a lot of energy for serious entries, I let my fantasy run wild and wrote The Absence of the Bloggist, a rare venture into fiction.
We had a super Christmas with both couples on Christmas eve.

My Resolutions for 2012 are:

    Top Secret

Wishing Everyone a Blessed New Year!

 

 

First, a quick regretful note that presumably won't mean anything to most people reading my blog. Just allow me to state that there is no defense against ridicule, but none is necessary because it is a boomerang. I'm not going to promote the reference by being more specific. Quis scit, intelligit.

The days continue to be rough. Physical fatigue breeds frustration. Frustration engenders depression. Depression increases physical fatigue. Fortunately, there are cookies on which one can draw decorations.  I saw them at the grocery store yesterday. They come with a set of four kosher (pareve) food-color pens, and they bear the outline of a Christmas tree on which one can express one's creativity. I assume those pens are meant to be used for other purposes as well, since it wouldn't be necessary for Christmas-related material to be kosher. I just notice these things. Needless to say, I bought a pack, and it lifted my spirits for a short while.

I mentioned in my last entry in connection with my Christmas video that I wasn't wanting just to make up the 127th jazzed-up version of "Away in a Manger." However, since music is my single biggest escape, after having written those words, I couldn't help but try to see what would come out. So, below is number 127, or--for all that I know--number 1,378,127. The first verse is just a piano playing right out of the hymnbook. I find it amazing how on a piece like this, even with electronic simulation, the best piano in my tone bank still winds up sounding like a small-church piano, an instrument that seems to get the more detuned the more you tune it. After that I change instruments and make some improvisations; eventually the melody returns. Click on Mary and Joseph, and then on the little control gadget to hear the music.

And now, after many months, it's time to get back to the Bible. My plan now is to finish 2 Kings, and then return to the bowl of Old Testament alphabet soup, as served by source critics.

		Bible Reading: 2 Kings 23:28-30
v. 29: During his reign, Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt marched up to help the king of Assyria at the Euphrates River. King Josiah went to confront him, and at Megiddo when Neco saw him he killed him.. (HCSB)

Despite the many (self-generated) interruptions, we're getting close to being done with 2 Kings. There have been a lot of ups-and-downs with the various kings. We left off with Josiah, who definitely constituted a serious "up," attempting to bring the kingdom of Judah back to God. Unfortunately, he came down with a fixed idea that ended his life early.

We are looking at a crucial point in history here. As we know, the Assyrians had been terrorizing their world in the name of peace and stability, though most of the rest of the world had not been very happy with the cruel and bloodthirsty way in which they sought to bring about those values. Babylonia was growing in size and strength, and was ready to supplant Assyria as lords of the Near East. The two armies were getting ready for a decisive battle around the city of Carchemish in northern Mesopotamia.

Assyria had a surprising ally. For most of their concurrent histories, Assyria and Egypt had been fierce enemies, but, as I mentioned earlier, King Ashurbanipal of Assyria had marched down to Egypt, killed all potential pretenders to the throne, and made a man named Neco the Pharaoh of his choice. So, when Neco got a message about the impending confrontation, he headed up to Carchemish to fight alongside Assyria against Babylon.

In order for Neco to go north for the battle, he and his army needed to march up through Palestine. Now, for some unknown reason, Josiah thought that he needed to stop Neco. Maybe he calculated that Judah would be off better under Babylonia (a dicey calculation), or maybe he thought that, as a king devoted to God, he could defeat Neco miraculously, reminiscent of some of the victories of, say, Jehoshaphat. If so, he acted without divine mandate. In Chronicles 35 we read that Necho even told him that he stood in the way of God's plan. Nevertheless, Josiah disguised himself in battle, the same trick that didn't work out for King Ahab, and put up a stand against Neco in the area of Megiddo. Similarly to Ahab, Josiah was struck fatally by an arrow.

Neco's participation in the battle of Carchemish did not contribute to an advantageous outcome for his side. Nebuchadnezzar, the son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon, defeated the combined forces of Assyria and Egypt. In the meantime, by popular acclaim, Jehoahaz, son of Josiah, became the next king of Judah.  

Merry Christmas everyone! It's been a good one here.

We put up our tree about two weeks ago, taking our time. As you can see in the picture, before it was decorated, a goldfinch came and perched on one of its branches. Actually, if you look real hard, you can see it on the picture of the fully decorated tree as well.  In case you're wondering, the Christmas pickle, which is an old German tradition invented by Americans a few decades ago, is on the other side of the tree.

Yesterday (Saturday, viz. Christmas Eve), both couples came over, and we had a wonderful, unrushed Christmas celebration. We follow the German tradition of opening presents on Christmas Eve. First we had yet another thanksgiving dinner that can't be beat with turkey and red cabbage and potatoes and rolls and three kinds of salsa. Then we gathered round, and each person, including the animals on the premises, had to pick a Christmas song to sing. Actually, the owners made the choices on their behalf. Meghan spoke for Sunaco, Amber represented Mischa, and I chose for Poly (rhymes with "holy"), who--given the presence of two dogs--was in another part of the house anyway. Then I read the Christmas story from the Bible and prayed, and then we went around opening presents.

It was a good year for presents for your bloggist. I won't give you an inventory now, but let me mention just one of them. It's the PBS video of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, whose headquarters is on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. They fall into the category of "Dixieland," though with their own take on it. I can listen to them for hours. In fact, both June and I have. On the trip in the fall, whenever we played a CD in the Dakota, it was almost always theirs. The video has some different tunes on it, though it closes with the obligatory "Just a Closer Walk" and "Oh When the Saints." Additionally, of course, you get the visual side and the way in which they inject their personalities into their music.  Their selections posted on YouTube are pretty uneven, but this is a pretty good representation from another video (either earlier or later, with some personnel changes and lesser visual quality.) There wasn't time to play my new video last night, but as soon as I could today, I played it. Whenever I play good, thumpy music, Poly likes for me to pick him up and dance with him, so I got a pretty good workout, too.

I've been thinking a little about Christmas, all the activities and traditions we practice around it, and its origin as a celebration of the birth of Christ. (The fact that Christians picked the day of the Germanic Yule celebration, which roughly coincided with the Roman Saturnalia, was a matter of convenience, not syncretism.) Jesus came as a human being, born into Jewish culture and brought up with it. He came specifically in order to immerse himself in our lives, complete with, as I say, human culture and traditions. He was not a docetic, let alone gnostic, figure, both of which--if I may speak without too much theological refinement--deny his full humanity and make him out to be God, barely disguised as a human being. I'm thinking of a ghostlike figure with a spiritual glow floating a foot or so above the ground. That was not Jesus. He had (and has!) a human nature in all respects like ours, only without sin.

I'm bringing this up because there are always Christians who are not very confident about the contemporary celebration of Christmas, and I want to say that, if Jesus was not afraid to embrace human culture, we need not be so either. Now, let me clarify that I don't have the contemporary commercial excesses in mind, nor the manner in which certain figures associated with "secular" Christmas have taken on semi-divine qualities themselves. Our Christmas celebrations should never crowd out the reason for celebrating it. However, it's perfectly alright to enjoy the celebration activities without having to scrooge them up with displays of pietosity. You're not making Christmas Christ-centered by, say, not having a Christmas tree, but you can make it Christ-centered by putting up a Christmas tree in honor of his birth.

Hope you had a fun day. God likes it when we enjoy ourselves in his honor.